In the prior art, screw shredders, shear shredders and hammer mills are known as devices by which waste products such as lumber and general industrial and municipal waste are broken into smaller particles and/or homogenized and compacted for further disposal processing. A single auger shredder described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,253,615 is an improvement over such types of shredders and provides a greater degree of efficiency and adaptability to various sized waste materials.
There exists a need, however, to provide a shredder for processing large volumes of waste, for homogenizing bulk volumes and for shredding very large scale waste items. For example, there is a need to provide a means for processing truck load volumes of municipal waste prior to landfill introduction so that air pockets present in conventionally sized "trash bags" that are sealed are removed. There is also a need for a shredder feeder mechanism for mass burn operations at waste disposal sites. Similarly, waste that occurs in the form of bales, such as corrugated cardboard bales or cotton bales, and other large scale waste items such as telephone poles, wire spools, railroad ties, appliances, automobile parts, 55 gallon drums, or other bulky materials are desirably processed by shredding into smaller pieces before incineration, landfill processing or compaction. In like manner, general industrial wastes are desirably shredded and homogenized into a bulk of generally uniform consistency and the invention described herein provides an apparatus for that purpose.